HackRU 2015

Hello everyone,

It's been too long since the last blog post. Today, I want to share with you an amazing experience called a Hackathon. Hackathons usually last around 24 hours in which you must program something from scratch (we got food and drinks of course). This can be a program, game, app for a smartphone, or just take something and turn it into something better. Recently, a group of four went to the Hackathon over at Rutgers University: Steve, Connor, Nick, and I. The experience of being around other programmers was amazing and fun.

To start, I taught them Lua and the Love2D API. We decided upon making a game, and it had to be simple. If it was too complicated then nobody would understand how to play or we would end up running out of time. Furthermore, we had to plan who would be doing what. For starters, we found out that Steve was really good with sprites. He would do the art along with music since he also had the program to do it (FamiTracker I believe, FL Studio was also suggested). Nick did most of the testing, and Connor helped program. Everyone contributed to programming.

Steve working on some sprites for practice.

At first, the WiFi at the athletic center would not work properly since there were many computers using it. This lasted for quite a while, but my team did not worry. Soon enough, I asked Steve to begin making the player sprite: a ship. Our idea came to us as inspiration from the game Asteroids but with fruit.

Connor being hyped, the ship sprite being made, Nick writing some code

After that, I began to set up a dropbox, pretty much our lifeline to sending updates of our files for the game at any given point. We could have used Github, but that would have taken too long and none of us had really dealt with it. Soon enough, we had a functioning game. It had simple mechanics, physics, highscore saving and loading, and all that fancy stuff (not really much else, but you get the idea). Of course, none of us stayed up the full 24 hours for the Hackathon. We slept around 4:00 am EST. That's probably the latest I've ever been up doing a programming project. We woke around 7 am, except for Steve who just didn't get much sleep and went back to do more work around 5:30 or 6:00 am.

Steve spriting an asteroid

 Overall, we had lots of fun and made a game we all enjoyed to play. After the 24 hours, we had to present the project science fair style. We didn't win, but many people came over in interest to see the game and to play it. If you program, or even are interested in doing this kind of activity, you should really try and go to a Hackathon.